Powershell in a Month – Day 3 – Commands

This one is about commands, and getting familiar with what a cmdlet is, the naming convention, and how to call things. Again, simple stuff, but knowing that most everything is a Get-xx, or Set-xxx, or New-xxx, etc. is handy. I think the hyphen separation actually makes things easy, though the completion in the ISE and with tab is very handy.

The big thing here is the parameter naming and cmd.exe execution. I wasn’t always clear on how parameters work, but this chapter helped. In this case, unless there’s punctuation or spaces, you don’t need quotes. That’s handy. I also like that the shell is explained in reference to cmd.exe, which is the command prompt that so many of us use.

This was a short chapter, a quick skim, and I made sure that as the authors talked about commands, aliases, etc, I ran all the code. When I got to the end of the chapter, I was able to actually solve all the exercises without using any references. I used help to look up commands (like Get-NetFirewallRule), but otherwise, I was able to solve all the exercises in about 5 minutes.

I felt successful and more empowered today. It’s getting a little exciting, and I can see where this will be very helpful over time.